I am meditating. In a room in Rodeo, at the rickety old secretary/dresser I use as a desk. It is by a window. I look out at the roadway, and think I am glad to live at a crossroad. The house across the street is silver grey. By its front stoop is a tree all […]

Writer and academic Lauren Elkin discusses her latest book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, the freedoms and constraints of urban space for women, and the power of first person.

To me, writing a book is also creating a game for both myself and the reader. Over at the Believer Logger, Natasha Boas talks to Julia Deck, author of Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, about unreliable narrators, conciseness, titles, Paris, French publishing houses, and mysteries.

I once heard the only thing faster than the speed of light is the speed of thought, and I wonder if simply thinking about Sawyer’s sister until my head hurts could get us to the place we fear talking about.

The Feminist Bookstore made famous by Portlandia has kicked the show out, saying the show “throws trans femmes under the bus.” Specialty bookstores are finding that filling a niche is often the best way to survive the onslaught of online competition. Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company turns sixty-five, and OUT takes a look back through store’s famed […]

While Fitzgerald’s haunts have certainly evolved over the years, and some have disappeared altogether, visitors to Paris can still relive the old-fashioned glamor of Fitzgerald’s Paris. It requires imagination, champagne, and a touch of despair. In an article for Travel + Leisure, Jess McHugh writes about the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and how visitors […]

Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily, Alice Kaplan, author of the new biography Looking for the Stranger, writes about Albert Camus’s […]

The French obsession with America popular culture takes form at the Pompidou Center in Paris with relics from the Beat Generation, including the famous 120-foot scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road, in a comprehensive exhibit. Frank Rose reports the details for the New York Times.

The project to bring a second bookstore to Queens, New York has met its Kickstarter goal. The borough of 2.2 million people was down to a single bookstore, Astoria Bookshop, after a Forest Hills Barnes & Noble closed. Bangkok has a thriving bookstore scene. Amazon targets New York City’s literary scene with a brick and […]

One of the missing Hong Kong booksellers has been returned, and gave a speech warning about the power of China’s central government and the waning independence of Hong Kong. Tiny, the cat that lives in Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, had a big adventure in the city—he disappeared, causing panic among the store’s employees, before deciding to […]

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